Real-life Tarzan who lived in jungle for 40 years dies of cancer just 8 years after being brought to the city

Ho Van Lang, 52, died of liver cancer 8 years after he was reintegrated into the civilised world, and his friend said modern life was damaging to him.

Lang and his family fled civilization when a US bomb killed his mother during the Vietnam War in 1972.

Lang, his brother Tri, and his father Ho Van Thanh spent most of their lives deep in the Vietnam jungle because his dad had a “profound phobia of returning as he did not believe that the Vietnam War was over”.

They reportedly thought the war was still going on until they were brought back to civilisation in 2013 when Lang’s father became sick.

After they left their isolated life in the jungle, Lang lived with his father in a small Vietnamese village for eight years.

For 41 years, Lang didn’t know that females existed.

Lang has now succumbed to liver cancer and passed away on September 6, 2021.

His friend Alvaro Cerezo, an explorer who returned to the jungle with Lang to live there for a week together, believes “modern life” probably had fatal consequences.

Cerezo said: “I’m so sad to see him go, but for me, his passing is also a liberation because I know he was suffering in the last months.

“But I didn’t like seeing him living in civilisation. I was always concerned that he and his body wouldn’t be able to handle such a drastic change.

“He had spent all his life living in the jungle and then came to live in the “civilised world” where he started eating processed foods and sometimes even drinking alcohol.”

He added; “He was the most fascinating person I ever met and extremely sweet at the same time. When we were surviving together in the jungle, everything that would take me hours to achieve, he could do it in seconds.

“He was a little kid with the skills of a superhuman.”